Surprising Road Sign

 

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I encountered this road sign on our recent trip to Alaska.

I have never seen such a sign before.

While it is true that deaf children don’t hear cars coming (and I know from experience that many special needs children have over-protective parents) my theory is as follows:

* Children at play should be supervised till they are old enough to be careful

* Children shouldn’t play on the road.

This applies to all children, hearing or not.

When the deaf child who lives in that house is old and responsible enough to play unsupervised, I am pretty sure he /she won’t be playing under the sign. And if the child hasn’t yet learned to be highly aware of cars, then supervision is what is needed, not a road sign.

Perhaps the fact that I don’t live there, or in the USA at all, is impairing my ability to understand the context in which this road sign was considered the right thing to have in front of the house.

Because I don’t get it.

Do you?

Saturday’s Book – “Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe” by Fannie Flag

I haven’t updated this category since we left for Alaska but I have been reading!

This was the first book that I read on the trip. I had seen the movie years ago and didn’t remember too much about it except that I really enjoyed it.

Perfect choice for many hours of traveling – light, engaging, interesting and amusing.

Delightful!

How Can I Bring Personal Travel Experiences into the Classroom?

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(click on the photo to enlarge and read)

 

There is a part in me that objects to the question I myself have just posed. Being on vacation, traveling (or doing something totally different from ones daily activities) is important to any person’s well being. There is no need to translate everything into classroom terms – I believe that a happier teacher is a better teacher!

And yet…

I saw the sign above, with the poem, on the very first day of our family trip to Alaska. Beluga Point was our first stop after leaving Anchorage. I found that the poem “stuck with me” throughout the trip, because it connected to the very strong sense of awe I felt while visiting Alaska. We are not intrepid backpackers who spend a week in a tent in the rain or hike in inaccessible areas. We stayed in cabins or B&B’s with hot showers and went on hikes on familiar trails.

Nonetheless we had awe inspiring experiences.

Not only are the vistas along the roads stunning, the close encounters with glaciers incredible, the bald eagles whizzing past majestic (and of course there are the bears and the moose!) consider experiences such as the following:

* On a guided boat ride in Kenai Fjord we saw humpback whales collaborating together in what is called bubble-net feeding. They all exhale at the same time and create a bubble that sucks in the fish.

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* On a small hill next to the B&B we were staying at, we saw (at close range!!!) a herd of about 400 caribou migrating from their calving area to their winter area. The next morning we saw them fording the river.

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So, I think it is clear why the feeling I feel the strongest from this trip is a sense of awe.

If I want to think in classroom terms I need to define what is it exactly I want to share with my students and a sense of awe regarding nature is not a very clear definition to work with.

I’ve had an unsuccessful experience with travel tales in the past.

A year and a half ago our youngest son went on an amazing youth trip to the ANTARCTIC!  After our son returned, he made a slide show and lectured in different classes at his high-school. In the slide show you could follow the stages of his long journey on the map, see icebergs, penguins and life on the boat. So, I decided to create a suitable worksheet (with answers to be found in the slideshow) in easy English for my pupils and bring it to class. The level of general knowledge and world geography knowledge is pretty low in many of my high-school groups of deaf and hard of hearing students.I had hoped that the fact that this is a true story about my own son would capture the student’s interest and something about the Antarctic might sink in.

The results were mixed. Some pupils did react as I had hoped. But others basically only reacted to the fact that the teacher’s son was lucky enough to get a full scholarship and THEY would never be so lucky (luck, yeah, my son found the organization himself, filled out forms, wrote essays, got recommendations, got the scholarship only the second time round, but for them it was like winning the lottery). They weren’t interested in the rest at all.

So, any suggestions (beyond sneaking some of these photos into online worksheets) on what to do in the classroom with my strong sense of awe of the natural wonders of Alaska?

A Picture Guide to Being a Teacher

* Photos by Gil Epshtein

Being a teacher is making each learner want to exclaim, “I’ve got mail”!

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Being a teacher is giving them a safe harbor in which to work on their boats before sailing away.

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Being a teacher is “kvetching” about your day and then coming into school the next morning with a smile on your face.

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Being a teacher is being incredibly alert for seven or eight hours straight, day after day.

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Being a teacher is juggling between the needs of the class and those of individual students.

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Being a teacher is explaining the same thing in twelve different ways.

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Being a teacher is wondering why on earth you got into this profession in the first place!

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Being a teacher is recognizing that part of your work is like footsteps in the sand – you have nothing in your hand at the end of the day to hold up and show: “Here is the imprint I made in the learner’s brain”. Nonetheless, the imprint was made!

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Saturday’s Book: “Visual Impact, Visual Teaching” by Timothy Gangwer

Not long ago I asked for recommendations for a useful book that my aunt in the U.S could send me for my birthday. By the way, the recommendations are here if you want to see them or add one of your own!

I’m glad I chose this book! I got a warm recommendation for this book. Although I duly noted that info I’m embarrassed to say that I did not note who recommended it – so if you are reading this post this THANK YOU is for you!

What I will do with ideas from the book in class is not a topic for a Saturday’s posting, but the book isn’t just for teachers. It is a book that enriches your knowledge of  visual information. There are some photography tips too, we’ll see if I remember them when taking pictures in Alaska!

I can’t resist sharing with you a lovely idea in the book. I was just flipping through the book and it was the first thing I read:

Page 184, activity 363 Gift Catalogue:

Have students make a list of things that can be enjoyed for free. Photograph those things and place them in a “priceless” catalogue.

“The Friendly Eraser” (with “a touch” of Dogme) Has Its Debut

In a recent post I asked if a “No-Tech” talk would lead to this:

yawn1At this week’s AWESOME ETAI Jerusalem Conference I paid special attention to how other people were using technology at the conference.

On one hand, while I may not have been the only presenter without a PowerPoint presentation, you didn’t need many fingers to count us. The  presenters whose talks I attended used the PowerPoint well! Fran Sokel (who was at IATEFL Brighton!!) used it to present quotes from research on Effective Teaching and Jane Cohen (from the British Council), for example, delighted us with images related to a thought provoking lesson plan for students on “Is Google making us dumber?” Believe me, there were many others, too!

In addition, how could you have such a hilarious Pecha Kucha without PowerPoint?

On the other hand, almost no one took notes during a talk on any form of computer (nobody was tweeting the lectures either!). The sponsors provided paper and pens and they were extensively used. I felt the power of my PLN when I was the only one who recognized WORDLE when used in a talk.

At my talk, teachers seemed genuinely interested in things they could do using only the whiteboard, the marker and the “friendly eraser”. I hear that more and more schools have a Smartboard in some classrooms ( I personally have not seen one yet) yet it seems that for a large percent of teachers the simple whiteboard is what they use the most.

My talk was about weak pupils in high-school, who have trouble concentrating during the best of times and particularly so when something “occurred” before class. Paying homage to Jason Renshaw and Mike Harrisson (see links by clicking on the Live Binder icon in the middle column of the homepage) we went through building a short text with the pupils with no previous knowledge (on the teacher’s part) of what would be the issue on their minds, despite their limited vocabulary. Then we “milked” the text in a number of ways using only the “friendly eraser” and the marker. I brought the first text, for the absolute weakest level, ready from my classroom ( and wrote it on the board). But I was getting more confident as the talk proceeded and created the next text with the teachers in the room on the spot (it was named “Never Buy an Engine from a Mermaid!)

I ended the talk by reading out Shel Silverstein’s short poem “This Bridge” (see Live Binder!).  I was trying to stress the point that other teachers don’t have to do these things the way I did them. I  read ideas and adapted them to suit my needs, thus making them my own. As it says in the poem “This Bridge will only take you half way there” one can’t expect  a strategy or a lesson plan to fit your class and your teaching style as it is. “The last few steps you’ll have to take alone.”

Oh! And I didn’t see anyone yawn!

Saturday’s Book – LISTENING to “Roughing It” by Mark Twain

Besides all the various material I’m reading, you can now find me “armed” with  an MP3 player (never had one before), moving around the house and listening to Mark Twain!

Did you know it can be legally downloaded for free from Libravox?

Although I was more interested in Mark Twan’s book “The Innocents Abroad” as it was about Europe and the Middle East, his delightful language and descriptions are such a pleasure to listen to that even silver mines become interesting!

Now I can get more reading done this summer, by reading and listening!

Notes from a Short Summer Course

between a rock and a hard place

* Photo by Gil Epshtein

I just finished teaching a short summer course for ninth graders who will be my new 10th graders this September. Only five children (out of 8 that the course was intended for) attended the course. I will have 17 new students but the others come from mainstreaming and were not included in the course.

I’ve been teaching such summer courses for many years. We always devote a lot of time to activities related to the “ABOUT ME” topic as it is a good opportunity for me to get to know the pupils, their learning styles and interests, while learning about their level and abilities. I’m very flexible about stopping to talk about anything that comes up. As Fiona Mauchline writes in her terrific post   “A place of Greater Safety” , I think that such discussions, even though they are in Hebrew, contribute to building a good relationship with these pupils. Many of my pupils have a lot of emotional issues. If they don’t feel “secure” in a class that deals with a very frustrating subject (for children who don’t hear well!) then we get stuck at first base.

However, do these discussions, for some of the children, really have that effect? Brad Peterson’s interesting post “Do you share your values in the classroom?” made me feel proud to know teachers like Brad and sad about the discussions I had this past week in comparison, particularly with one of the girls.

This girl hears comparatively well but comes from a linguistically (and otherwise) impoverished background. That was clear from this story she related the first day. The girl told me she knows how to ride a horse. I was duly impressed and asked her where she rides as I know she live in a city. She explained that she has relatives in a village and she goes there almost every holiday and rides horses. When I asked this 15 year old the name of the village she goes to so regularly, she didn’t know! We were using fun worksheets from abroad that have Monday as the first day of the week and write the date differently from the way we do. I explained about that but her attitude was that she does things her way and the rest of the world better copy her because she’s certainly not interested in the way they do things!

This is not new to me. Like the students who insisted that zebras come from the Safari Wild Animal Park and not Africa or the one who refused to accept that it rains in the summer in other parts of the world. I call these pupils the “don’t confuse me with the facts” pupils. Sigh. Brad is discussing values with his pupils and these pupil argue about where  zebras come from!

Important to note that there are others. Not only are some of them bright and curious, some come from backgrounds where everything seems to be “against” them (profoundly deaf, poverty, immigrants etc.) and they are still amazing.

Does the fact that I’m constantly trying to expose these kids to the wider world that exists out there just intimidate those from the ‘don’t confuse me with the facts” group”? Am I shaking their teenage world by confronting them with facts such as people don’t work on Sundays in many places in the world? Because members of this group (thankfully, NOT A HUGE GROUP ) fight me every step of the way with such information.

Saturday’s Book: We Need to Talk about Kevin – Part Two

I’m very conflicted about this book.

Lionel Shriver’s writing is brilliant. She (Yes, Lionel is a woman’s name! I was surprised!) draws the reader in and captivates with truly impressive prose.

Obviously she’s trying to shock and provoke the reader. Somewhat like a well written version of a Michael Moore film. There are certainly points to think about regarding society, media, parenting and more.

On the other hand, I felt that the author undermines her own message by depicting SUCH a dysfunctional family. It’s hard to buy the message that it isn’t just the parent’s fault with these parents, particulary the father and the relationship between the parents. I kept screaming at them ( in my head) throughout the whole book, from the beginning almost: “why aren’t you all in therapy?!!

Also, the ending -sigh. I watch a lot of foreign films (foreign, as in not Hollywood) and well, without spoiling it for anybody, that was an American ending. A movie which I actually hated (gave me nightmares!), but deals with comparable topics and has an ending which is more believable is Funny Games by Michael Haneke (the original version, don’t know anything about the American Remake).  Though I’m not actually recommending you watch the movie… there are others that are more palatable. Just here the topic is similar.

I’m also somewhat concerned – many of the people who recommended this book to me aren’t parents yet. I do hope this book hasn’t scared them!

My next book will be something more cheerful!

Will a “No-Tech” Lecture Lead to THIS?

Photo by Gil Epshtein
Photo by Gil Epshtein

At the upcoming ETAI (English Teachers’ Association of Israel) conference I will be giving a no-tech talk for the first time and I’m somewhat nervous about it.

I’ve always* given talks using an overhead projector, both at conferences and at various other venues (such as teacher in-service days or evenings for parents). I do not read from notes at a talk. My transparencies always contain an abundance of pictures (“visualising ideas” person, after all!) and a sentence or two. That has kept me from getting confused and missing something when I’m nervous.

* About the always – there was one notable exception. It happened about 12 years ago. I had my transparencies ready, of course, but there was a power failure five minutes after the lecture began. I gave the rest of the talk to the 35 people who came by the light of a few emergency-lighting lamps. It was the first time I had (uncharacteristically) gotten my hair done before a lecture. Have never done THAT again!

At this conference BARCO projectors will be available in every room but the presenters must bring their own laptop.  Overhead projectors are “passé” and are no longer available. I don’t own a laptop and don’t intent to buy one in the near future. Ninety percent of the time I really don’t need one.

I’m working on  a talk with a situation similar to that of many teachers in the classroom – just me , the learners and the whiteboard. Trying to put some “dogme” in it too (we’ll see!).

Rationally, it sounds like a good plan.

Still, I’m nervous I’ll get confused without my picture prompts.

The lecture is at three fifteen in the afternoon. Will it be interesting enough without slides to keep the audience from yawning?

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